I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Strip It Down and Sell It for Parts

I’m going to start by focusing on the positive. I’m sitting on 27 PLEX, and after about a
week of the price sitting at 1.2 bil, they’ve crept up 20 mil in the past
couple hours. More importantly, we’re
seeing spread compression – the buy and sell prices getting closer – as both
continue to rise, suggesting that the price will only continue to
increase. Indicators are great for my
profits!

"We can take it out as easily as we can put it in!"

The reason, of course, is the Exploring the Character Bazaar and Skill Trading dev blog. In a nutshell, CCP is
announcing a new NEX store item that will allow players to extract 500,000 sp
from their characters and sell it, as a unit, on the market. Effectively, this allows players to trade sp
to each other, drawing down their character’s stock in exchange for isk.

This, in and of itself, isn’t bad. Players have been asking for a means of
eliminating sp for skills they don’t use (though, admittedly, this attitude
tends to be a result of vestigial thinking back from when clone levels
existed). But added to this sp transfer
is diminishing return.

Once your character has more than 5 million sp – a paltry
sum equaling around three months of training – injecting transneural skill packets
results in the reduction of the amount of sp you actually gain. This loss is 20% for up to 50 million total
sp, and becomes increasingly onerous as your total sp increases.

Why This
Solution? Why Now?

When I learned about this skillpoint trading proposal after
work on Thursday night, I felt like I had missed a whole month’s worth of
context. It came out of nowhere and
solved no pre-identified issues. The
character bazaar seemed to be working perfectly fine, and the act of shopping
for a new character was an intimate, complicated one that involved a lot of
factors, all building to a purchase of a set of characteristics bought as a
singular whole.

But when you widen your gaze, it’s much easier to understand
the rationale. Eve players are old. Very old, in fact. Because characters are able to be traded on
the character bazaar, a great many characters – tens of thousands – have been
training skills continuously for a half-decade or more. The history of Eve is, in many ways, the
history of CCP adding new skills and ships to constantly demand more sp, racing
against the “end game” at which point players have literally nothing new to
fly, train, or do.

As a result, even when players leave the game, the
characters they cultivated can continue to live on, a stark contrast to many
other games, for which players quitting equates to lapsed, stalled, or stagnant
characters as well. With shortcuts –
purchasing high-sp characters that allow them to fly ships and do things they
couldn’t do for years if locked into their existing characters – players reach
the point where they’ve “done it all” much faster than they otherwise would.

Isk can be destroyed.
Players leave. Ships are rebalanced
and offer new experiences. Standings can
be lost. Security status is fluid. Only skillpoints endure in perpetuity. Much as the in-game universe of New Eden has
a problem with immortal capsuleers who are forever immune to the consequences
of their actions, CCP has a skillpoint problem.
They endure, and are beyond the company’s control. And it’s shortening the life of a player, as
they can access content faster than generations before them.

At least, they will be up until this change goes into
effect. The secret to CCP “gaining back”
those skillpoints lies in diminishing return.

Sure, if a character below 5 million sp injects a transneural
skill packet, they can directly transfer sp without any loss. One player loses 500k sp, another gains
it. It’s a simple transaction, and
allows new characters of existing players to gain up to 10 packets’ worth of sp
almost immediately. That’s the
equivalent of about three and a half months.
It’s not that big of an advantage.

On the other end of the spectrum, injecting a packet above
50 million sp results in a waste of at least 60% and as much as 90% - a
ridiculously high level that sends a very clear message that sp transfer is not
for established characters.

The vast majority of transfers are likely to happen in that
5-50 million sp range, which conveniently represents the range where players
are most likely to find an extra 500k sp particularly useful.

I’m sorry, 400k.
After all, every time a player injects a skill packet, 20% are removed from
the game forever. At the prospect of
adding an extra 400k sp immediately, I’m sure demand will ensure a sufficient
supply of skill packets to keep a high daily level of sales. That adds up to a large skillpoint sink.

And, let’s keep in mind that aurum will be used to purchase
the transneural skill extractor. And any
way you cut it, the costs of extracting all of the sp for a 90-mil sp
character, for instance, will be far, far higher than the 2 PLEX necessary to
transfer a character currently. To move
85 million sp, you’d need 170 extractors.
To break even, the cost of the extractors could be no more than slightly
over 14 million isk each (based on a 1.2 bil PLEX price). A 100 aurum token has a buy/sell split of
75/199 mil, so that price is likely far, far too low, and I don’t see these
extractors costing less than 100 aurum.

Plus, the other restriction – a floor on sp extracting that
sits at 5 million – means that each character will never drop below 5 million
sp. CCP has also said that they aren’t
planning on getting rid of the bazaar “for now”. But what about the future? I can’t see both sp trading and the bazaar
coexisting forever. Regardless, the
result will be a large number of fully siphoned characters with no inherent
value. Effectively each one of these
characters is another 5 million sp removed from the game, as well. Any way you cut it, this proposal results in
a significant removal of sp from the game.

Balancing the Equation

As players increase their skill points and start to reach
the “endgame”, CCP’s reaction in the past has been to release new ships that
require even more skill points. They did
it with carriers and dreads, with strategic cruisers, and with titans. They’ve rebalanced the skills needed, and
added additional prerequisites.

CCP has started to realize that the result of all of these
new skills is an ever-increasing gap between older and newer players, the
latter of which found they needed to train for almost two years simply to get
the skills widely considered “necessary” for PvP. In the past couple months, they’ve offered additional
sp to new players and are seriously considering removing attributes (and their
negative effect on maximum skill training speed) from the mix.

But, part of me wonders if the diminishing return of skill
trading is a necessary half to the equation that began with CCP allowing us to
sell whole characters. After all, allowing
players to sell a character is a great feature and benefit to players that
gives them what they want in a way that maintains the consequence and ramifications
of character actions.

If you can preserve sp from player to player like that,
doesn’t it require some sort of balancing to reduce that sp available to
players as well? In fact not having that
mechanism simply accelerates the Skillpoint Problem and shortens the time
between creation of that first character and bitter vet unsubbing. I can understand both the desire and need to
address it.

This represents a dynamic shift in how CCP is addressing
this problem. After all, there are two
ways to solve for players forever retaining and increasing their sp – giving
them more goals, or taking some of those skillpoints away to create an
equilibrium.

In economics, you have the prisoner’s dilemma, where two
people are independently given choices which encourage them to make selfish
choices that influence each other. But,
in so doing, they end up diminishing the overall potential of their gain. This is CCP’s version of a prisoner’s
dilemma. You can inject sp, but in so
doing, you’re reducing the total pool available, and serving as a sink to the
system. Repeated thousands of times and
in conjunction with players who simply unsub and never touch their characters
again, it represents a significant dip in overall sp in the game, which helps
mitigate that sp problem.

I’m sure they have stats on the total amount of sp on all
active characters, all characters who logged in in the past six months, the
average sp per player, etc. And I’m sure
they know exactly how much sp they would need to drain to make an impact on the
problem.

Speculators, You’re
Already Too Late

At the beginning, I hinted at this causing upward pressure
on PLEX prices. Anyone expecting relief from
the price of PLEX should pretty much give up hope at this point. This feature will be another significant
demand-side effect. PLEX reaching 1.5
bil isn’t unreasonable. Buy now, while
you can.

But, as players take advantage of this sp-siphon, you’ll
start to see fewer and fewer valuable characters for sale on the character
bazaar. We’re likely to see prices for characters
who have both plenty of sp and solid faction standings – the last non-buyable
aspect of characters – increase as fewer and fewer “whole packages” remain.

That Awkward Feeling

While I get the rationale behind this change – eliminating skillpoints from the game – I’m uncomfortable with the way the dev blog sought to spin
it. It focuses the advantages of
creating modular characters, and suggests that CCP is doing us a favor by
allowing increased flexibility by trading sp “without having to part ways with
an entire character.”

The marketer in me recognizes a great narrative built from a
clear messaging hierarchy, but I also recognize an obvious spin attempt when I
see it. In reality, this change serves
CCP’s interests, and dressing it up as if it’s a service they’re providing to
players stretches the obligations of marketing to “tell only the best parts of
the truth”. The giant elephant in the
room – that CCP is going to take in more fees for this and help mitigate their
skillpoint problem – is ignored. Sure,
it’s written elegantly, but a solution to a problem no one knew we had was
bound to raise questions.

Plus, I’m still uncomfortable by players across New Eden
carving up their characters and selling the parts for profit. It feels anti-immersive. Sure, buyers are in the position of being
able to augment their alts’ skills (let’s face it, most mains are going to be
well over that 50-mil rationality threshold) instead of having to sell them and
buy new ones. And yeah, this is going to
improve players’ ability to customize their characters. But on the other hand, to the seller, they’re
effectively reprocessing their characters piece by piece, stripping them into
component parts.

Having sold characters before, I worry that even if I tear
out the sp of one character, it’d diminish my connection to my others. The human psyche can’t devalue one item
without also devaluing everything of its kind.
For a company with what by all accounts is a diminishing player base
from a weakening of player engagement with the game, I’m not sure this is the
right move.

At the very least, even if you buy a character on the
bazaar, you’re buying it whole, with all of the consequences and benefits of its
history and activities staying with it.
There’s a culture, heritage, and identity of that character. This change seems to move it into a world of
chattel for sale.

6 comments:

As someone with less than 20 mil SP on my main I welcome this change for selfish reasons. I will very likely buy FC V, and Jump Cal V as well, simply because those 2 skills would otherwise take months for very little gain. Looking at CCPs benefits for this change is interesting though, thank you for a well written analysis.

Very well written. A side i definitely did not take into account until now, but your right, this is probably the driving force here. It's a big change, and change makes people feel uncomfortable. I think a lot of the knee jerk reactions to this announcement was just that initial feeling before they were able to sit down and think about it rationally for a while, and to understand it.

I agree with a lot of this, but I have to take a bit of issue with the following passage:

"I’m uncomfortable with the way the dev blog sought to spin it. It focuses the advantages of creating modular characters, and suggests that CCP is doing us a favor by allowing increased flexibility by trading sp “without having to part ways with an entire character.” The marketer in me recognizes a great narrative built from a clear messaging hierarchy, but I also recognize an obvious spin attempt when I see it. In reality, this change serves CCP’s interests, and dressing it up as if it’s a service they’re providing to players stretches the obligations of marketing to “tell only the best parts of the truth”."

Obviously they're going to try to put forward any new feature in the best light they can, but I think it's quite a bit too strong to dismiss that framing as *only* 'spin' or 'narrative'. As a player I agree 100% with the idea that the ability to transfer skillpoints without transferring characters is a valuable service. I suspect I'm in the minority, but I would never use the character bazaar, despite being in its prime audience of a relatively new player who could really make use of a middling-sp bought main to jump-start my eve career. My character is *mine*. I pondered his name for several days before I made the account to be sure I had something I would be happy with long-term. I spent several hours poring over all of the outfit options and other details that nobody else will ever see and fiddling with that portrait that nobody ever pays any attention to. I'm no roleplayer, but I still couldn't use a character that I didn't create, it would just seem wrong. From my point of view the value of being able to snag a few extra SP for my main is far more than mere marketing spin, and I don't think it's fair to describe it as only that.

Same here. RP-wise and immersion-wise, I could never buy a character. I even hate having a transport alt, as I am thrown out of the imaginary narrative I like to think of, and reminded I am just playing a game.

Of course, more logical/scientific/pragmatic players probably don't feel that way. Being a Sci-Fi game, I would tend to believe there are more pragmatic players than dreamy ones out there :)

Really good point. I would never sell Talvorian or Valeria. Oddly, though, as my different characters do different things, I start to build a sense of who they are and a narrative about them. Surprisingly emergent!

I think this feature could actually add to the supply of PLEX. Right now if new players buy PLEX to sell for ISK so they can buy expensive ships they are told they are wasting their money. In the future when a new whale joins the game and wants a quick boost he can use PLEX to buy both expensive ships and the skills to fly them. Of course without the meta skills to fly them he'll still burn in a fire.

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